Module One
Amy: I always loved a chime! Hello darlings, it’s Amy Ahlers here, and we are so excited and delighted to welcome you to Module One of the Find Your Calling class. I’m joined here by my sisters in inspiration, and welcoming all of you into this Purpose Party, this Life Purpose Party that we’re going to have, that’s going to allow you to really connect in with your soul’s work, and help you clarify what it is that you are here to do. And so I have Martha Beck and Lissa Rankin here with me, and I know all three of us are just honored, deeply honored, that you have decided to take this time out over the next seven weeks to be with us, and to be in community around such a noble, noble mission. And it’s a real honor here. So Martha, do you want to have us get anchored in here, my dear, with a meditation?
Martha: Sure, we were just talking about how frantic the world is today, and how – we’re sometimes taught in courses, school, the learning annex, whatever, to get very very hyper and manic before we do anything significant. But our experience – the three of us have spoken about this – and our experience is that nothing in the world cannot be made better by relaxing, that peace is the ground of creativity, of inspiration, of communion, of love, and that energy comes from that like a spring comes out of the earth.
So the first thing I want to do is invite everyone on this call to sit down, or lie down if you are in a place where you can do that. Maybe you can only stand quietly, but get as relaxed as you possibly can physically, and take a few deep breaths. Everybody says to do that because we are one of the few creatures that can control our breathing, and long, slow breaths our bodies associate with peace. So even if you’re not feeling peaceful, a couple of good long exhales – and no animal running from a predator ever goes...sigh. So teach your body to feel safe by breathing long exhales, and then full inhales. If you are in a place where you can close our eyes, please do that. If you’re not, please turn so that your eyes are still instead of watching something. Maybe put your eyes on one focal point, and then hold them still. You can look at everything around them peripherally, but just let your eyes rest.
And then imagine a huge hurricane. So you’ve seen this on the TV screen, where the news reporter has tied himself to a telephone pole, and there are boards, and cats, and flotsam flying by, and people are boarding up their windows, and everything is chaos, and the winds are howling, and the water is coming ashore, and no-one knows what to do – that is kind of the energy setting of modern life, especially in the United States. It’s enormous turmoil, whether you look at the news, or whether you talk to a friend, or whether you’re with your family, we tend to focus on the stress, the anxiety, the threat. And this turns on the fight-or-flight response and makes our creativity and our power inaccessible to us.
So now just observe the hurricane, and imagine yourself as a point of consciousness that’s going to move up off the ground maybe 20 feet, and then out over the ocean – that grey, frothing ocean where the wind is frothing it up just like meringue. Everything is crashing and smashing, and fluid, and dynamic – but you are still. Feel that stillness in the place right below the spot where your ribs come together in the front. Above your naval and below your ribs, there’s the geometric center of your body. Find that stillness from which your body functions. And now drop that consciousness down into the water, and notice that nothing can disturb it. The water can’t disturb it, the wind can’t disturb it, the flotsam flies right through it and disturbs it not one whit. It drops down into the top of the ocean, where it’s very very turbulent, but nothing disturbs you. You feel warm, and still, and peaceful.
You keep dropping down, and the water goes calmer. The light gets dimmer, but it’s not a frightening dimness, because you’re relaxed, you’re warm, you’re centered, you are breathing, you are impervious to any object. You are ‘no thing’, and so no thing can disturb you. Continue dropping down, down, down, down, the water gets stiller and stiller and quieter and quieter. And finally you reach a place, 3,000 feet below the surface, that is so still that the blue whales go there to call to each other, and the sound waves can travel a thousand miles. So still. Find the ocean floor, and drop a deep anchor into it, almost down to the center of the earth. Salute stillness. Realize that you are the entire line of energy, running from below the ocean floor, all the way up to the clouds above the ocean, and that this line of energy can experience everything without distress, without fear, without damage – perfect peace.
Now move to the land again, just as a point of consciousness – but remember, that anchor is already established. It’s something you can touch, like a cord. You can reach out and touch it with your hand at any point. You’ll find it near you, and it always takes you down to the depth. It’s from there that all life comes, from that place of complete peace. And all you have to do is grasp it with your hand to feel the whole range of it, whether you’re feeling manic and excited, or terrified, or calm, you’re going to always experience the full range of emotion without becoming trapped in it.
So some lovely poet wrote this line: “All tempest has like a navel, a hole in its middle, through which a gull can fly in silence. You are the gull, you are the silence.”
So anchor that by actually grasping it, closing your right hand in a fist round that line of energy, and know that you can hold it – it’s like a fish wire, it’s so thin, but it’s absolutely indestructible. It will never, ever, leave you or let you down. And hold onto that if you feel any anxiety, any resistance, any extreme excitement during this whole program. Return to the line that takes you from peace to enthusiasm and back down again.
So with that, now that you’re anchored, we’d like to start the process of helping you find your calling. Amy?
Amy: One of the first steps in any process is to really anchor in with that intention. And so on each and every one of these teaching calls, we’ll be setting an intention, and together, in community – whether you’re listening live on the phone, or on the webcast, or listening to the recording later – we want you to actually proclaim and state an invocation. So for this first call, we really view this journey over the seven weeks as a process of remembering that your soul did come in with a plan, that you said ‘yes’ to a purpose, to a calling, and now you’re saying, “I am ready to remember my calling.” So I’m going to unmute the lines in a moment, and on the count of three, we will say three times together, in community, really saying and stating these words from that space of silence within you, that space of peace within you, and also that space of enthusiasm and commitment within you, to say the words three times: “I am ready to remember my calling.” “I am ready to remember my calling.” “I am ready to remember my calling.”
And this is really an invitation to you to mean it, to actually say the words and mean it from the core of your being, to allow this moment in time to be one of those moments that you can look back up on and say, “When I said those words, it mattered. When I said those words, it created something new for me. It was the beginning of something beautiful unfolding before my eyes.” So that’s the invitation that we’re putting out to you now. So on the count of three: “I am ready to remember my calling,” three times. Okay, here we go. One, two, three: “I am ready to remember my calling.” Whoo.
Martha: Wow, that’s awesome.
Amy: I love it, ladies and gentlemen. How beautiful is that? It is the experience – yes, we’re using all this technology and all of these virtual things, but the truth is that we are creating a community right here and right now, and that I just feel like light bulbs going off everywhere. There’s people from around the world joining together, so tap into that collective consciousness, and use that energy, use our community website, use the energy on these calls to really tap in and allow yourself to feel the sense of being supported, and breathe up in this ocean of people who are coming together for a joint purpose. Beautifully done, thank you everyone for doing that with me.
Lissa: Well hi everyone, Lissa Rankin. And first I want to start by saying it was really fun – I love being able to communicate with you all on Twitter. Social media is one of my favorite things. So we’re going to be using #FYC2013, if any of you all want to reach out on twitter. And Martha is @MarthaBeck, Amy is @AmyAhlers, and I’m Lissa @LissaRankin. So feel free to share your thoughts and we go and follow the hashtag FYC2013, so you can see what everyone is saying.
Amy: A little Tweet-tweet from Lissa. Surprise surprise!
Lissa: It’s been such an interesting time lately, to just look around and see that even since we taught this program a year ago, things are shifting in our collective consciousness, and there are more and more people joining what Martha calls The Team – these people that are really feeling called to be part of the healing of the planet in some way, part of the healing of the souls of other people, or of animals, or plants, or the environment, or our professional lives – all of those things. People are just starting to really wake up these days, and there’s an incredible frustration I think, when you’ve sensed that, you know, “Oh yeah, I’m part of the team,” and you’re not sure what you’re being called to do.
And so, I’m so delighted that we’re here to be able to help the people that are feeling that way. I know there are a bunch of people in my personal life right now who are all in this place where they’re like, Okay, the phone is ringing, but I can’t quite hear the message yet. And I know this can be really stressful for people, when you know that there’s this calling that’s coming in, and you’re just not quite clear what it is. And you’re feeling like finding your calling is now something else that you have to add to your to-do list in this frantic life, where there’s already so much on your plate.
So Martha, I know you have some definite opinions about all this, like why now? Why are people ready for change? Why do we need to find our calling? What is our role as individuals who are part of this awakening of the collective consciousness, and how can everybody be of service in their own way?
Martha: Well, first of all, I think everyone realizes that this is an unprecedented time in the history of our planet. There has never, ever, in all of history, been a time when the earth was overcrowded by humans. There has never been a time when there was a ball of plastic larger than the state of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. There has never been a time when internet technologies and other communication technologies have created so much ability for so many people to share knowledge and information so quickly and so inexpensively. And all of these things are having profound effects – effects that will change humanity and world history in a way that we cannot know.
Several years ago, a Pulitzer-Prize winner in economics, it was called The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. And by ‘the world is flat’, he was saying that what it once took a government or a huge, huge company to do, like send a message that millions, hundreds of millions of people would get in some way, one individual can now, with very little effort, communicate that broadly and that powerfully. And that means that all the terrain of the economy and business that created our social structure – anything that created society – is now radically changing. So many many industries are disappearing. Many many people are losing their jobs – and it’s not just because of bad politics, or foreign people immigrating or anything like that – or even being sent overseas, though there’s a huge amount of that too. It’s really, the technologies of humans are changing, and it’s almost as profound as when humans first made fire, and everything mushroomed.
Well, we’ve made a different kind of fire now, and we live in a different kind of, what I call chaos. And I don’t mean completely meaningless, like random crap. Chaos actually has a shape, and has patterns, and nature is shaped by chaos into all the beautiful things we see, the plants, the animals, the sky, the mountains – everything is shaped by the laws that govern chaos.
Now, for about 600 years, human structures have been not at all chaotic; they’ve been removed from nature, further and further and further. Human life has become more and more systematized and mechanized. So the whole industrial revolution was about factories and new methods of manufacturing, where, as the basis of the economy for the very first time in human history, people had to leave their homes and go sit in the building, usually a very unpleasant building, and physically attach things to each other. Physically process some sort of product. And this became the basis for what we now all a job. And when the machines were all made, and the knowledge work became more prominent in the twentieth century, the factory stool was replaced by the cubicle, and everybody competes and struggles to get into those cubicles to those things we call jobs. And in particular, men have been taught to draw their whole identity from their jobs, but also women – very much so. To have a great career has been status, wealth and power in our system.
Guess what? The writing on the wall about jobs, they’re going away. They’re not as stable as they once were. The ones that still exist, people are having to do more work for less pay to compete with the flat world. I just worked with the top-20 executives from the third largest company in the world, and what they were talking about was the competition that they might get from a 15-year-old nerd with a laptop. I mean, this is just a wild, wild time.